IT may be a mite simplistic to divide artists into usual and unusual suspects. But the truth is there are names that don’t surprise when it is announced that they are to be the subjects of coming exhibitions, and others that do, and pleasantly. This year such surprises are on the rise.

This season there is no shortage of major museum exhibitions devoted to expected figures, many of which nevertheless sound promising. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will attempt to clarify the fecund influence of Andy Warhol, one of the most usual of them all, in “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” which opens on Sept. 18 and will combine his work with the efforts of five dozen artists from succeeding generations. The Met will also revisit the evolution of Henri Matisse with the rather evangelically titled “Matisse: In Search of True Painting,” a show opening on Dec. 4 that originated at the National Gallery of Denmark and that focuses on pairings of closely related works.

To keep things balanced, the Guggenheim Museum will counter, starting on Oct. 5, with “Picasso Black and White,” a look at more than 100 of the least colorful works by Picasso, Matisse’s Spanish frenemy. And beginning on Oct. 14 the National Gallery of Art in Washington will host the retrospective of the Pop innovator Roy Lichtenstein organized with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern. In addition the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will gather scores of works by Jasper Johns from private collections in the Bay Area for a show beginning on Nov. 3, and in February the Art Institute of Chicago will do the same with Picassos in its vicinity.

And then there are somewhat less expected subjects, like the ceramic sculptor Ken Price, whose relentlessly innovative, suggestive and extravagantly colored work will be shown in a survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that opens next Sunday — the first full-dress retrospective of Price’s art to be held in his native city. (It will travel next summer to the Met in New York, a city not known for its interest in contemporary ceramic-based arts, where it will really seem anomalous.)

In Washington the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will mount the first American retrospective of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known as much or more for his political activism as his Conceptual sculptures and installations. Opening on Oct. 7, it will be a chance to see how his art measures up to his courage as a public figure.

But museum schedules this season suggest that truly unusual suspects of all kinds are pulling ahead of the usual, widening our sense of both the present and the past as they go. In terms of the past, two art-historical odd men out, the Swiss Post-Impressionist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) and the American Ashcan School painter George Bellows (1882-1925) will receive renewed attention from two New York museums.

On Sept. 20 the Neue Galerie will open the largest American museum survey yet of Hodler’s stylized realism, which absorbed aspects of Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Expressionism and was manifest in self-portraits, portraits, Alpine landscapes and masterful drawings. And the first Bellows retrospective in more than three decades will come to the Met from the National Gallery of Art on Nov. 14, presenting some 140 works in paintings, drawings and lithographs and highlighting both his gritty but lushly painted scenes of urban life and the more lyrical Woodstock, N.Y., landscapes of his late style.

Moving forward in time the Museum of Modern Art will bring the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (1926-73) into fuller view with the first large-scale survey of her work in the United States. “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972,” opening on Oct. 7, will feature about 100 works and should be especially illuminating regarding that artist’s use of casts of her body — a kind of realism implicitly connected to work by Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, George Segal and Paul Thek.

The Grey Art Gallery at New York University is leading off its season with “Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore,” a retrospective of the artist-activist who died in 2002 at the age of 48. The show, which opened on Thursday, concentrates on his allegorical paintings, which borrow from Surrealism, American Scene realism and illustration, vividly taking on issues like pollution, AIDS and the health care industry, while a concurrent show at the university’s Fales Library & Special Collections will focus on Moore’s notebooks, preparatory drawings, filmmaking and writings.

A more purely perceptual realism will be visible in “Lois Dodd: Catching the Light,” the first full retrospective of this 85-year-old plein-air painter, which will arrive at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., in January. Despite their basis in observed experience, Ms. Dodd’s landscapes, interiors and still lifes can run the gamut from Precisionist clarity to painterly, even hallucinatory near-abstraction.

It makes sense, but is no less striking for it, that a great many of the unusual suspects are women. The Conceptual photographer and video artist Carrie Mae Weems — who has dealt so incisively with the African-American experience while also leaving her mark on staged photography, photomontage and the image-text fusion of classic Conceptualism — will be the subject a retrospective opening on Sept. 21 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, and later traveling nationally, including to the Guggenheim.

Prominent on the Brooklyn Museum’s fall schedule is “Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,” the first museum exhibition devoted to the extravagantly bulked-up collage paintings and collage-related photographs of this talented young artist. She has brought to both landscape and portraiture — mostly of black women in elaborately styled interiors — a new, art-historically savvy, implicitly feminist force. (The show, which opens on Sept. 28 and has been organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California, is named for Courbet’s most notorious and risqué painting.)

Also worth mentioning are the museum shows of R. H. Quaytman, an American artist known for her distinctive fusions of photography, painting and site-specificity, at the Renaissance Society in Chicago in January; the abstract yet subtly politically minded American painter Carrie Moyer at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., the same month; and the Scottish installation artist Karla Black, whose wonderfully free-form, if not messy, color-infused pieces will be featured in April at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. These three shows, and Ms. Dodd’s, may be characterized as outliers in terms of the size or locations of their respective museums. But major big-city institutions would be smart to take notice.

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2012, on page AR66 of the New York edition with the headline: Going Beyond Marquee Names On Museum Walls. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe